A Christmas Carol

The “Holiday Season” had come to San Francisco, cool gray city of love, bringing with it thundering rains and icy blasts from off the Pacific. I had been working the Yerba Buena Housing Project, known to its residents of the “Pink Palace,” for almost six months, part of a “special detail” put together in an ad-hock sort of way by the San Francisco Housing Police as an excersize in public relations. What in the Army we use to call “eye wash.”

It helps if you think “Police Academy” meets “New Jack City.”

Poorly trained, poorly equipped and barely supported by the city’s thirteen other police departments, our chief goal was to go home alive after our shift each night. Just how little support we could count on was dramatically demonstrated to me the first week I was on the job. I had heard gunfire and called in a report.

The dispatcher seemed more than a little offended at having his time wasted by such a trivial matter and hotly informed me that I was not to bother him again unless I had a dead body on the ground. Come to think of it I don’t think he used the term “body.”

I don’t know why many of my fellow officers were there; some were barely distinguishable from the gang bangers we had to deal with. One guy was a pimp, and proud of it. He would show up for work in a gold colored Cadillac with his “ladies” (again, memory fails me but I don’t think he used the term ladies) and they would set up business in some of the abandoned apartments that riddled the housing project.

After a while I got to understand what was important and what was not. Robbery and assault? Important. Drugs and prostitution? Not so much.

I was there in the hopes of putting together a photo portfolio that would help me break into documentary photography. I always carried a camera slung by a strap under my armpit and hidden by my windbreaker. I had made a point of explaining to the residents why I carried it and that it was not worth a whole lot of money. I would make up 5x7’s or 8x10’s of my better pictures and give them out to the people I had photographed, in part to curry favor and in part so that they would know I wasn’t trying to bust anyone. I got to know a lot of the more prominent citizens of the project on a first name basis and had a nodding acquaintance with many of the rest.

There was one old man who in no way stood out from the others, other than he seemed a little more lonely and a little more friendly than most of the others. He would smile at anyone who would smile at him, and many who would not, and if you weren’t quick on your feet he would corner you and try to strike up a conversation. He was a bit of a bore and to my shame I cannot remember his name.

The upper floors of the Pink Palace were a jungle where most of the apartments had been abandoned and crime was rampant. It wasn’t as though there was any lack of applicants to live in the apartments; the city had long waiting lists of people who were desperate for housing. However, the Housing Department had strict rules that forbade any apartment from being rented until it was up to code. The city’s Public Works Department also had strict rules as to who could do the work to bring those apartments up to code, their people and no one else.

The trouble was that they could only spare enough workers to fix up one or two apartments at a time, and the work would usually take days to complete. However, there was a large constituency for keeping these apartments abandoned, made up of drug dealers, prostitutes, homeless people (who could sneak in at night for a warm place to sleep) and kids who just wanted someplace to play where adults weren’t watching them all the time.

These people saw to it that just before work on an apartment was completed it would be thoroughly vandalized and work would have to start again at square one. The whole thing was a bureaucratic perpetual motion machine

.

However, some people did manage to live in this wilderness of abandoned apartments, crack houses and dens of prostitution, and one of them was that friendly old fellow. One day as I was patrolling the upper floor balconies that served as hallways for the housing project I noticed that he had decorated his window for the holidays.

He had whited out the window and painted “Seasons Greetings” and “Peace” surrounded by crudely drawn bells, stars and other seasonal decorations. What caught my photographer’s eye was not the quality of the decorations but the incongruity of such a message sheltering behind iron security bars, so I pulled my camera from under my jacket and took a few shots. Later I developed the pictures and filed the negatives away.

Christmas and then New Years came and went with only a few drunken brawls and one knifing. After the holidays I was able to get two weeks vacation, which I badly needed by then.

Mrs. Heurea (her I remember) was one of the “movers and shakers” of the Pink Palace world, a perpetual squeaky wheel who was always clamoring for more oil. Like the rest of my fellow officers I avoided her whenever possible but on the day I got back from my time off she cornered me and demanded that I investigate a bad smell in her apartment.

I could smell it as soon as I walked in. It smelled like a rat had crawled into the walls and died. I knocked on a few doors of the surrounding apartments and sure enough everyone could smell it but most of them had not bothered to complain. These were the projects, after all, and bad smells were pretty common.

I went up a floor and went into some of the abandoned apartments thinking that if we were lucky the rat had died in one of them, which would greatly simplify the cleanup process. Finally I came to the door of the friendly fellow and knocked. I knew I was getting close because the smell was getting really bad.

There was no answer. I knocked again. Then I asked some of the residents if they had seen the fellow around lately. They had not. I did not like the suspicion that was beginning to form in my mind.

I called my watch commander on my radio and he told me to kick in the door. I did, and had to stagger back as a wall of stench hit me like a two by four between the eyes. From inside came a roaring buzz from flies and other insects. Holding my breath I stepped in the front door and saw him sprawled on the floor in the middle of the living room. Decaying flesh and puddles of oozing liquids left no doubt he was dead. My partner Violet, walked in, took one look at what was on the floor, walked out to the balcony and threw up over the side.

Well I had met the criteria that had been laid down in my first week and I called for City Police back up. From then on it was out of my hands.

Christmas is often seen as a time for family and friends, for parties, presents and celebrations, but for many it is the loneliest time of the year. Each year, as Christmas approaches, I dig out that old photo of the window, put on that “cheesy song” by Band Aid and read what I find are some of the most moving lines in the Bible, Matthew 25:31-46.

You can read the rest for yourself but I will give you the kernel of the nut:

"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'

And with that I wish “Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.”

Brainy art hiding inside a Michelangelo classic

Understanding art is often a matter of seeing the symbols that the artist uses to convey their message and perhaps the inside jokes he or she are playing on their audience. Scientists have found the image of the brain in a classic art piece.

Many who have looked at Michelangelo's "creation of Adam" on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel have thought that the drapery behind the image of God bore a suspicious resemblance to a human brain.

Now four respected scientists are claiming that the shape is not just decoration but rather an artistic representation of a cross section of the sagittal section of the brain.

This idea was first suggested by FL Meshberger but he has since been joined in this hypothesis by Antonio Belli, Alessandro Paluzzi, Peter Bain and Laura Viva. They have also suggested that Michelangelo was not the only artist to have played this trick on their audience.

Explaining how he came to this conclusion Alessandro Paluzzi said:

"The idea came to me while looking at Raffaello's Transfiguration. Being a neurosurgeon I could immediately see a brain in the painting"

What the general public sees.


What Paluzzi and his colleagues think that they see. The right hand photo is a cross section of the human brain.

The scientist claim to have found many other examples of the human brain hidden in Renaissance art. It has long been known that Michelangelo, like many other artist of his time, often took part in dissections of human corpses, a practice frowned on by the church.

It is the opinion of the four scientist that many of these artist were enthralled by their scientific discoveries but, given the hostility of the church to science, had to hide their discoveries from the general public. Such discoveries were sometimes even seen as heretical. Galileo was hauled before the Inquisition for his claim that the earth circled the sun and many early scientist were put to death for their intellectual curiosity.

Many, however, could not resist the temptation to smuggle these images into their work as a sort of inside joke for the amusement of those who knew what they were looking at.


The "mind of God?"
If we compare the drapery behind the figure of God in Michelangelo's famous painting to a modern cross section of the brain we can see that there are some undeniable similarities.


This is your brain. Any questions?

Many art aficionados, down through the centuries, have noted the incongruous fact that there is a naked woman, whom most agree is Eve, under the left arm of God. What is she doing there at the time God is creating Adam?

If we accept, for the moment, the theory that the drapery represents a brain then it becomes possible that this is suppose to be the "mind of God" and that Eve is therefore present in God's mind, or plans, even as he is creating Adam.

We will most likely never know what was in the mind of Michelangelo when he painted this work but the idea that he was using his knowledge of human anatomy as a sort of inside joke, while at the same time making a profound statement about his deeply felt religious beliefs, is a useful tool for understanding this famous and intriguing art work.